Reflections on a quote from Hostile Environment
Maya Goodfellow’s book ended with a thought on how health safeguarding would become an excuse to tighten borders. I reflect on recent events that show how sometimes the Home Office doesn’t need an excuse. They make their disdain blatant.
Why I read this book
It’s been on my to-read list since 2020, and I figured it was time an immigration book made its way onto my 10 books for 2023 list.
Hostile Environment on Verso Books
Why this post
The afterword of Hostile Environment, titled ‘All of the Lessons That Haven’t Been Learned’, was written in June 2020 in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic.
In it, Maya describes how in a time where the UK Government was claiming we’re all in it together, they were not budging on their cruel immigration policies. Punishing migrants was prioritized over public health.
There was one quote in the afterward that particularly stuck out to me, reading it in 2023 when Covid restrictions have gone away.
In this post, I share that quote and my reflections on it.
The quote
It’s easy to imagine how the border will be invoked when the pandemic is over. Stronger borders are more necessary than ever, they’ll claim, to protect us not just from threats to ‘culture’ and the economy but to safeguard our health.
My reflections
If I were making a prediction in 2020 on how Covid would affect future UK immigration policy, I would have thought the same thing as Maya.
But given recent news this week, I’m reflecting on how sometimes the Home Office doesn’t need an excuse to tighten borders. They make their hatred of migrants of quite blatant.
On Wednesday, the Home Office added Honduras and Namibia to the list of countries that need a visa to travel to the UK.
Home Secretary Suella Braverman’s reasoning for this was because of an increase in asylum seekers from those countries.
This is not the first time this has happened. Last year, the UK added El Salvador to its list of countries needing a visa to travel to the UK when a crisis hit there.
And now, the Illegal Migration bill has become law, which removes “the right to claim asylum from those who arrive in the UK independently”.
So reading this quote — 3 years after it was written, in a week where we’ve just seen the destruction of the UK asylum system — I’m thinking about how the Home Office doesn’t need public health as an excuse to not help people.
They make it very clear needing help is the thing that will get you shut out.
10 books in 2023
This is my seventh book recap as part of my 2023 goal to read 10 books this year.
Read my post on why I set this reading goal
Previous posts:
- 6 things I learned reading The 1619 Project
- 4 reflections after reading The Connected Campus
- 5 quotes I want to remember from Mating in Captivity
- Mental Models didn’t help me learn what I wanted to about mental models
- What I learned about Matthew McConaughey from reading Greenlights
- 10 things I want to return to in Leading Content Design
Next book
Back to a content book. I’ll be reading Content Transformation by Hinrich von Haaren.
